It's Just a Ride

So here I go.

I am starting to blog today, October 13, 2009, a day significant in so many ways, because:

1. It is the very first rain-storm of fall, after months and months of nothing but summer sun.

2. Therefore I spent an hour walking in the rain with my love, near the Santa Rosa creek, watching the brown rapids and long-legged birds, as I got soaked to the bone.

3. It is also the birthday of my best friend, Mel, at whose wedding a month ago I gave a rollicking maid of honor speech.

4. It is an extremely rare day off from school, in the middle of the week, due to Nonesuch's camping and rafting trip over the weekend, where I dove for white egg rocks on the bottom of the cold clear river.

5. It is the day that I have finished---finally! after months and months of revision!---my Balloon Essay, which I will submit for publication to as many places I can find, by the end of the week.

6. When you inverse the number 13 you get 31: which is the date of Halloween, my favorite holiday; which is the date of my birth, in December; which is the age I will turn in two and a half months.

7. It is the day that I finally decided to stand up to my fierce inner critic, who has been bullying me for a year about how I can't start a blog until it is PERFECT, how it will never be PERFECT, and how I should just give it all up. It's the day I realized, while walking in the rain, that all I ever have is right now, and right now I want to write. Even more, I want to urge my writing into the world, where people other than me can read it. I want to stop being so damn afraid of PERFECT, I want to accept and let go, I want to write. I want to stop listening to all the tales I've spun about how everything should be. I want to spin tales about how it is, right now, about how life is far from PERFECT, and thank God, because what a burden perfection is.

I want to make peace with that critic, who cowers on the other side of the couch, hoping I will find a reason to stop before I post this. I want to hug her, hard, and tell her it's all okay, everything is always okay, and look, I'm not free of her, I started my first blog trying to imbue this day, this very experience, with significance and meaning, just like she wants me to do. She desperately wants order, control, because for so long, way too long, she's feared chaos. But it's in the chaos that I am born. The chaos is the rain and the peeling eucalyptus bark and the smoky campfire and the messy gluey collage and the birthday party and the whole wide unplanned day.

I want to blog to escape, if only for a little while, the order. I want to blog to remind myself of what Bill Hicks, that brilliant prophet/comedian said: It's just a ride.